Software development stuff

RStreamTuner - New Streaming Directories Browser

Jan 22nd, 2010

I like to listen various Internet radio stations while I work. My favourite application was
streamtuner mostly because it had support for SHOUTcast. Unluckily new SHOUTcast design cannot be handled by streamtuner and future development on this application is
stopped. In other words there is a little chance for streamtuner to be upgraded so I’ve decided to make my own streaming directories browser – RStreamTuner (Ruby Stream Tuner).

As usual developing in Ruby was real pleasure and only doubt was what to use for GUI part. I’ve started with Ruby/Tk and left it very quickly due to very poor documentation (and probably lack of Tcl knowledge). I had
to find replacement and my primary goal was to find library that works equally well on Linux and Windows. WxWidgets with WxRuby gem was my final choice. Although RStreamTuner is still in early development
phase it is quite usable. At the moment it supports SHOUTcast and Xiph directories, but I plan to add more as soon as I find good one. Good candidate could be Live365 but they’ve made their pages quite hard to
parse so I’ll probably leave it for later.

Once I reach beta version, making support for new streaming directories will be quite easy and will require implementation of just a few methods. As a matter of act it is already so simple but I’m not
satisfied with the code and will change it once I find a little bit more time. Code is quite rough (I had little time to make RStreamTuner and was eager to get working version as soon as possible). Besides I
want to write detailed instructions how to add support for new directories. Anyway if you like to listen Internet radion stations and like Ruby clone RStreamTuner. Of
course if you have suggestions do not hasitate to drop me a note and if you make support for new streaming directory just send me a pull request and I’ll try to grab it as soon as possible.